THE MANIFESTO
We never stopped advancing. Evolution accelerated with every step we took. We walked away from primitivism, advancing towards perfection. Endlessly pursuing the immaterial canons that bathed in hedonism and pure narcissism. We have always wanted to be eternal.
Over the years, human ingenuity overflowed. Curiosity and the eagerness to stripe the world led us as a species down the path that brought us humiliation and deceit. We expanded into space, seeking knowledge over fire. Knowledge is power. Indeed, thought was confined within scientific societies like The Royal Society or the walls of Le Academie des Sciences, thanks to which the perception of the world was framed in technical, exclusive, and exclusionary language.
We evolved without considering the vague idea of seeing ourselves as animals. We reached states of consciousness and control that made us increasingly grand, definitively superior, solely due to our mental faculties. Our body, on the other hand, an obsolete but fundamental tool, imposed matter and the inescapable reality upon us—our constant and futile attempt to detach ourselves from our corporeality. We were bound; it was the soul, and it was the body.
Our journey bifurcated like rivers watering perfection. We yearned to bathe in their waters and immerse ourselves in their beauty.
"NOTHING MADE US MORE VAIN THAN BEING LABELED AS SINNERS."
"WE FELT NO SATISFACTION PROFANING A LAW THAT WAS INDIFFERENT OR UNKNOWN TO US."
The worst they could do to us was reveal the evil of the Seven Deadly Sins. We found them fascinating.
We never accepted our condition. We never believed that in their eyes, we were perfect, and we decided to act at the level of the God we believed in. We were made in their image and likeness.
We invented machines, devices, instruments, and tools that allowed us to compete in the world. We managed to control every species, studying and categorizing them, categorizing ourselves. The unfamiliar was terrifying. We had to control everything.
We developed our ingenuity by replicating nature.
"ONE THAT IN ITSELF SUGGESTS NOTHING, NO MATTER HOW SUBTLE OR GRAND IT MAY BE CONSIDERED, THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANY OF ITS INVENTIONS THAT HUMAN INGENUITY HAS NOT BEEN ABLE TO RECREATE."
We expanded our limits and allowed ourselves to go beyond our weak and vulnerable body. We let it diminish its own role and ignore its importance in existence. We turned it into our ornamental instrument.
We tirelessly sought to stretch time to the point of wanting to make our youth infinite. Our decaying struggle of lilies and roses colonized bodily territory in an attempt to immortalize our beauty.
We became slaves to our body, whatever its interpretation, whatever its purpose. We challenged our beliefs for our culture; action was our form of purification.
We did not accept our destiny because we realized we could change it. We overcame condemnation and understood how the body sins once and leaves sin behind. It wasn't the priest who absolved us; it was confession.
Science hypnotized us. It gave us the intense and penetrating feeling of an evolution accomplished during the span of our life. It compelled us to dream of mutation. We wanted to do it, but time, naturally, did not permit us.
We began to sophisticate ourselves, yearning for the day when we could fill ourselves with artifices and prosthetics. We became increasingly bionic, rising above the masses, evolving not as a species but as individuals. Our effervescent thirst to leave our humanity behind controlled us, but all we could pursue was the most perfect way to present ourselves.
We surpassed our limits. We accepted our infinite mental power by visually recognizing what we wanted to be. We changed how we inhabited space. We controlled our senses and perceptions by detaching ourselves from our identity in our body.
We immersed ourselves in unrealizable imaginaries and found our lively protest, our courageous attempt to teach nature its place. Art made us transcend.
The confusing mist protected us. It allowed us to substitute reality for the dream of reality. We materialized in our impossible imaginaries flooded with absolute magic. If we felt confused, it was enough to open our eyes to not recognize ourselves.
The simple pleasure of deceiving ourselves made us exist. We existed in the lie, in expression. Human nature is precisely a fiction, a theater, where.
We would have surrendered, but our addiction elevated us to a material detachment, and having it all, we wanted even more.
We then embraced the arrival of the future. We let ourselves be abducted. We recognized the longed-for mutation that would separate us from being human, considering ourselves the ultimate step in evolution. We would lift the plates and tables, take our pills, and live connected. We would rise to a higher intangibility.
Unaware, the frenzy and adrenaline clouded the sensation and power, and it entered silently like serum through our veins.
Dependent, we enjoyed every step of the way. We were completely out of control.
Full of pleasure.
Unbeknownst to us, our body was abducted, but by that moment, we had already
abandoned
it.
"WE ONLY APPEAR NATURAL WHEN FORCED TO PRETEND."
"THAT DREADED UNIVERSAL THING WE CALLED HUMAN NATURE WOULD COME, AND WE WOULD BE COMPELLED TO RESORT TO THAT FACULTY AS MORBID AS IT IS UNHEALTHY—TO TELL THE TRUTH."
POSTSCRIPT
This work was created as a result of various immersions, personal inquiries, immoral and borrowed, influencing a certain moment in my life.
I recognize decadence, lies. I acknowledge Wilde, Huysmans. I recognize that life imitates art, and it is art that molds it in its image and likeness.
In this way, and in this era, we live in a globality so fast and accessible that we can choose how to shape our existence within infinite resources in countless expressions of art, where originality is borrowed, and what transcends is its reinterpretation.
We are, definitively, what we consume, and in those decisions, we establish priorities to sacrifice pleasures, actions, or even people to live experiences that we have chosen to live.
Those experiences will be the engine to feel and deceive ourselves into living what we want. Accepting life upon its arrival would only destroy me out of boredom, and its personal performativity should be definitively Baroque—limitless and exaggerated.
Feel for the sake of feeling.
Lie for the sake of lying.